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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..

After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.

Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.

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My uncle married a woman with the same first and middle name as one of his sisters. My new aunt chose to use her husband’s name as her married name, without hyphenation or anything. His sister, my aunt, never married. One was an RN and the other is an LPN.

They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.

When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.

I’m missing something. Was your uncles spouse alive after your uncles sister passed?

Funny. I have a brother. We have at times lived together, went to the same school, and after not living together, lived on the same street. A couple of times, one or more credit bureaus decided we were the same person and silently merged our credit files. Not a nightmare per se since we're both fiscally (mostly) responsible, but we generally find out how incompetent the bureaus are when we're trying to make some very large transaction (I was trying to buy a car, he was trying to buy a building for work) and suddenly get "why do you own 2 houses, a bunch of cars, and you're apparently a bigamist". And then we had to scramble to untangle the whole mess. Lawyers were involved. The bureaus do not care in the slightest.

That's funny as a human, amazing as a developer, and terrifying as a data processor. All at the same time.

I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.

I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused.

We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.

Wait until you live in the same zip code with another person that has the same first name, last name and date of birth!

This was a story I found amusing when I read it: "Letter from Chicago. Confusion oriented medical records."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1605484/

When I was 18 I got called up for jury duty along with someone with the same name and age. It was confusing. They started referring to us by the suburb we lived in. Luckily both of us got passed over.

They both showed up in person, because that was NOT the first time that had happened.

Some time in the 90s I used to live at XXX Some Street West apt #1234 and my close friend at XXX Some Street East apt #1234. One day someone knocks on the door. I open and there is a pizza man. We argued for a while and he kept insisting that I did order it. Finally I asked him to show the order. Of course it was all the same but East instead of West. Anyways I called my friend and thanked for a pizza. This was so funny.

I have two younger brothers. They have the same last name, first initial, a history of having lived at the same address, and the same birth date, because they're twins.

Every time one of them goes to a particular medical facility, he has to explicitly decline having them merge their charts.

A couple years ago the WSJ had a feature article on the phenomenon of married couples who shared the same given name:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taylor-lautner-taylor-dome-wife...

Being married to someone with the same name could be very confusing!

How?

Responding to someone talking to your partner. Or who is the message for?

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